The Standard of Care After Montgomery: What "Reasonable" Carrier Vetting Looks Like

The black hole problem

The core issue is a regulatory vacuum: brokers currently operate without a federal safety standard for how they select carriers.

The relevant regulatory agency, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, requires brokers to select a federally registered carrier but does not otherwise impose safety standards on broker hiring.

— the regulatory gap at the heart of Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II (2026)

Read that again. FMCSA requires you to pick a registered carrier. That's it. There is no federal standard for what "safe enough" means. No required percentile threshold. No mandated monitoring frequency. No prescribed documentation format.

The Court filled this gap with state tort liability. The standard of care will now be defined by juries, case-by-case, state-by-state. Unless you define it yourself — clearly, consistently, and with documentation — you're leaving your defense to that unpredictability.

What "reasonable" probably means

While no court has yet defined the post-Montgomery standard of care for broker carrier selection, we can infer from the opinion and existing negligent-hiring case law what a jury would likely expect:

The "minimum standard" column is what most brokers do today. The "best practice" column is what a reasonable, well-prepared broker does — and what closing the gap between the two columns gives you: a selection you can document and stand behind.

The Montgomery fact pattern as a template

Look at what Montgomery alleged about C.H. Robinson's selection of Caribe Transport. The carrier had a "conditional" safety rating from FMCSA and was found deficient in:

• •Qualification of drivers
• •Hours of service of drivers
• •Inspection, repair and maintenance
• •Recordable crash rate

This is publicly available information. The Court's reasoning implies that if this data was available and you didn't check it — or checked it and tendered anyway without documented justification — you failed the standard of care.

Building a defensible vetting process

Based on the Court's reasoning, here's a framework that would likely satisfy the "reasonable care" standard:

What threshold should you set?

There's no legally mandated threshold. But FMCSA's own intervention thresholds provide a natural baseline:

• • Conservative: No BASIC above 50th percentile. Stricter than FMCSA; demonstrates proactive safety culture.
• • Moderate: No BASIC above the FMCSA intervention threshold (65th for UD/HOS, 80th for VM/CS/DF). Matches the regulator's own standard.
• • Minimum defensible: No carrier with an active FMCSA alert. This is the floor — anything less is hard to defend.

Whatever threshold you choose, document it as written policy, apply it consistently, and document exceptions with reasoning. Inconsistent application is worse than a lenient threshold — it shows you knew the risk and chose to ignore it selectively.

For high-volume brokers: the case for documenting at scale

A brokerage running thousands of tenders a month is exactly where documented vetting pays off most — the same simple check, applied consistently across the whole panel, turns volume from a liability question into a demonstration of a well-run process.

Industry data shows roughly 0.01% of broker-tendered loads are involved in fatal accidents — a rare outcome that happens across millions of miles even to carriers who meet every standard. Pre-Montgomery, federal preemption ended the inquiry on those. Post-Montgomery, each one is judged on whether the selection was reasonable and documented. The good news: that's a bar a prepared broker can meet on every tender. You know your panel size and your tender volume better than any pricing page can guess.

Documented vetting at the Enterprise tier of Broker-Aware turns every one of those tenders into a decision you can stand behind, at a per-check cost denominated in cents. For a brokerage at that scale, it's a rounding error against the value of operating to a clear, written standard — and a straightforward one for the GC and the CFO to agree on.

The standard is live now

Montgomery was decided on May 14, 2026, so the new standard of care applies now. There's no grace period to design a process — but there's also nothing complicated to design. A reasonable, documented selection is the whole answer, and it's well within reach for any brokerage that decides to lead.

Picture the eventual discovery request: "Produce all records of carrier safety vetting for [carrier] at or before the date of tender." If your answer is "we checked their authority was active" — that's the minimum. If your answer is "here's a timestamped safety assessment showing all 5 BASIC percentiles, alert status, and our documented threshold policy" — that's a reasonable selection, on the record. Prepared brokers will already have the second answer.

Define your standard now

The standard of care after Montgomery rewards the broker who gets there first with a documented, defensible process. Be that broker — not because the alternative is frightening, but because a clear, consistently applied vetting standard is what good brokers do, and now the law names it as the bar. It costs a known monthly subscription scaled to your volume, and it lets a reasonable decision speak for itself.